How did life originate? Ancient proteins may hold important clues. Every organism on Earth is made up of proteins. Although all organisms—even single-celled ones—have complex protein structures now, this wasn’t always the case.
For years, evolutionary biochemists assumed that most ancient proteins emerged from a simple signature, called a motif. However, new research suggests that this motif, without the surrounding protein, isn’t as consequential as it seemed. The study is published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
The international team of researchers was led by Lynn Kamerlin, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Georgia Research Alliance Vasser Woolley Chair in Molecular Design, and Liam Longo, a specially appointed associate professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Institute of Science Tokyo, in Japan.